Secret Britain The Nature of Britain

BIRDS SING

A typical corner of the British countryside.

The sort of place anybody would be happy to come for a leisurely springtime walk.

Birds singing...

..flowers coming into bloom, and a real sense of peace and quiet.

But there's more to this spot than meets the eye.

This is one of the least visited, most remote places in Britain -

so remote that more people have reached the summit of Mount Everest than have stood where I am now.

And yet, despite its isolation,

more than 100,000 people pass right by here every single day.

I'm just 25 miles from the centre of London,

at the junction of two of the busiest motorways in Britain, the M25 and the M40.

And yet, among all this noise, concrete and traffic,

there's a hidden haven for wildlife.

Britain is full of places like this -

places we think of as wasteland.

Abandoned. Derelict. Forgotten.

Yet these little bits of land up and down the country add up

to an area bigger than all our nature reserves put together.

They may no longer be useful to us,

but nature has moved right back in.

So what is it about places like these that make them

not just special for wildlife,

but one of the most important habitats of all?

In this, the final episode in the series, join me for a tour

around the hidden corners of our countryside

in search of secret Britain.

'Our story starts 2,000 years ago,

'when human beings were just beginning

'to make their mark on the landscape

'and have an impact on the native wildlife.'

Thank you very much.

I'm about as far north as you can get in the British Isles, on the island of Mousa in Shetland,

and I've come to look at an ancient monument,

but it's an ancient monument with some very special residents.

The first people to arrive here, a group of Iron Age settlers,

built a vast stone structure known as a broch.

Nobody quite knows why.

Then, as mysteriously as they came,

they moved away, abandoning the island and its broch.

But it didn't stay empty for long.

TWITTERING

Can you hear that?

It's a sound that's been described as fairies being sick.

Not very nice! It's actually storm petrels.

Can hear them, but to see them, we've got to wait a bit longer.

FLAPPING AND TWITTERING

Who'd have thought that if you'd have come

to a remote island off Shetland at dead of night in the middle of summer,

that suddenly everything would come to life?

And it has.

And what was this great lump of cold stone is suddenly a kind of vibrant tenement block.

There's this theory that they're being called to the right place by their mate.

There's so many choices of hole here, it must be very confusing.

And suddenly they'll pop into a hole.

Storm petrels are little miracles of nature.

Barely the size of a sparrow, thousands of these tiny birds

come here for just a few weeks every summer

to raise their young inside the safety of these walls.

For the rest of the year, they live out on the open ocean,

following fishing boats and picking up food from the surface of the sea.

And even when they're breeding,

one of the pair must still make a daily fishing trip

before returning after dark to change shifts.

What is it? Midnight - bang on midnight - and it's still not dark.

GULL CALLS CUT THROUGH TWITTERING

But you can hear the gulls are still calling, and that's why these petrels come in

under cover of darkness, or as much darkness as they can get at this time of year.

They know if they come in daylight, they'll be picked off by those gulls,

so they're way out at sea and then risk coming in only when the light's going.

That way, they'll be safe, they hope.

So by nesting inside the broch,

this particular colony of storm petrels

has discovered the perfect sanctuary, hidden from the dangers of the outside world.

I don't suppose those Iron Age settlers ever imagined that,

so long after they abandoned this place,

it would still be full of life.

But that's the story of secret Britain.

We move in, then move out, and nature takes over.

And meanwhile, 2,000 years later and 800 miles to the south,

the story continues.

There are some parts of Britain that, to put it politely,

you wouldn't expect to see in the tourist brochures.

Canvey Wick in the Thames Estuary is one of them.

But although this doesn't look like the sort of place you'd want to go out of your way to visit,

the wildlife takes a different view.

It's like a jungle down here. But then, this place has been called England's rainforest.

You see, there are more rare species of insects here

than there are in any other site in Britain of this size.

And yet, to the untutored eye, Canvey Wick looks like wasteland,

which isn't surprising, really, because that's what it is.

Places like this - old industrial land awaiting development - are known as brownfield sites.

But it's amazing how quickly they change colour.

First to arrive are some rather surprising plants.

You expect to find ragwort and thistles on waste ground, but rose campion?

You expect to find that in your garden, but it's an escape here,

and dotted around absolutely everywhere - masses of it.

And I suppose you'd expect to find the odd orchid. No -

an entire plantation of marsh orchids here,

enough to make a wild-flower enthusiast drool!

Hard on the heels of the plants come the insects.

The brown-banded carder bee

is now very rare because we've lost so many of our wild-flower meadows.

But here, it's doing rather well.

So what is it that makes this place not just good for wildlife

but home to such an extraordinary range of species?

Well, to find out why it's so special, we need to go back about 40 years.

The 1960s,

when owning a car was the ultimate symbol of freedom and the open road was truly open.

As motoring gathered pace, we needed oil refineries,

so they started to build one at Canvey Wick.

Then, in 1973, it all went horribly wrong.

A global oil crisis brought price hikes and fuel rationing.

The firm that built the oil refinery here went bust, and it never opened.

Eventually, the giant oil tanks that stood here were pulled down,

and the land was set aside for redevelopment.

Since then, despite the threat of the bulldozers, nature has been forcing its way back,

taking advantage of this unique little corner of Britain.

So with all this amazing flora and fauna, what a tragedy it'd be

if this wasteland were to be covered in concrete.

Well, the good news is, it won't be.

Canvey Wick is to become our first brownfield nature reserve.

So all this wildlife gets a reprieve.

You can see how quickly plants and animals reclaim the places we've abandoned and colonise new areas.

But what's really astonishing is exactly how they do it.

There's a scruffy, yellow-flowered plant that's so common today we hardly give it a second glance.

It just loves the messy bits we don't take care of, but there was a time

when it could only be seen in rather more refined surroundings.

Hence its name - Oxford ragwort.

300 years ago,

just about the only place you could find this particular type of ragwort

was here in the Oxford Botanic Garden, and you still can.

Here it is, in a bed labelled "daisies".

This plant's forebears were brought to Britain from their native Sicily,

where they grew on the solidified lava on the slopes of Mount Etna.

But of all the exotic plants that grow here, the Oxford ragwort

was the one with the best means of escaping the confines of the garden, and it did it like this.

Each seed has its own tiny parachute of hairs that enable it to float away on the breeze.

Oxford ragwort might have escaped the city's botanic garden by air,

but in order to colonise the rest of the country rapidly, it needed to utilise another form of transport.

WHISTLE

The dramatic spread of Oxford ragwort coincided

with the development of our early rail network,

and the Victorian naturalist George Claridge Druce thought he knew why.

"I've seen the seeds enter a railway carriage window near Oxford

"and remain suspended in the air of the compartment until they found an exit near Tilehurst."

That's over 30 miles away.

And Claridge Druce was quite right.

Blown along in the slipstream of passing trains, the seeds floated down onto the stone chippings,

which closely resembled the lava rock of Mount Etna, their ancestral home.

And because so few native plants could grow here, the ragwort took root and flourished.

WHISTLE BLOWS AND STEAM HISSES

And that's the secret of how one little plant spread throughout Britain.

Railways aren't the only man-made network that creates surprising new opportunities for wildlife.

Britain's major roads and motorways stretch for 6,000 miles -

about the same distance as from London to Tokyo.

To either side of these thundering carriageways,

the verges cover an area bigger than the whole of Dartmoor.

Unlike the farmland to either side, our roadside verges

don't get sprayed with pesticides or ploughed up for crops.

The result?

A long, narrow nature reserve we all see as we speed past, but seldom, if ever, visit.

And this hidden world is full of surprises.

From the rare Adonis blue to the familiar hedgehog, they're all here.

And there's one creature that lives here that's the only British mammal to outnumber us humans -

the field vole.

You'd think that with almost 80 million of these little rodents in Britain,

they wouldn't be hard to spot.

But from the vole's point of view, staying hidden is crucial to its survival.

For in the sky above,

a pair of eyes is staring intently downwards.

The field vole has a dilemma.

With a litter of hungry young to feed, she can't afford to stay put in the safety of her nest.

But if she moves,

she risks alerting the kestrel.

With its own family to feed, the kestrel can't afford to lose a potential meal.

The battle between predator and prey is about to begin.

The vole checks constantly for danger.

Head hardly moving, the kestrel's eyes stay locked on its quarry.

The vole in its sights, it goes in for the kill.

The kestrel chicks are the winners today.

The vole and its family finally ran out of luck.

Long before the roads and railways spread out across our land,

another means of transport, Britain's canals, reigned supreme.

But our canals haven't been used as a major transport system for over a century now.

Today, we use them for leisure and pleasure, a haven of tranquillity,

where you can float along without a care in the world.

And they're a haven for wildlife, too.

Water voles make their homes in the muddy banks.

While a flash of orange and electric blue

may be all we see of a kingfisher.

And damselflies perform their elaborate courtship displays over the still, calm water.

There's one other very special creature that lives here, too.

It's one of our commonest reptiles, but one we hardly ever see,

and it reveals just how important our canals are for wildlife.

The still water of the canal

is ideal for a predator like the grass snake,

which, despite its name, prefers wetland habitats.

The thick, lush vegetation along the banks

is the perfect place for amphibians, the grass snakes' favourite prey.

No wonder frogs hop so well!

But it's the nature of the canal system as a whole

that gives the grass snakes their most important lifeline.

Just like our roads and railways, canals form a network of corridors,

criss-crossing the country for mile after mile.

Long, continuous, and fringed with green, they allow the grass snakes,

and many other beautiful creatures, to find their ideal home.

# La mer

# Qu'on voit danser le long des golfes clairs... #

From narrow boats to the wide, open ocean,

we Brits just love the water...

..and being in it, under it or on it!

# ..La mer... #

And when you're not at sea, there's no safer place to berth your boat than in a marina,

where you'll be safe and sound and sheltered from the ravages of the wind, the waves and the weather.

But as well as being a haven for boats,

this place also provides protection for a hidden undersea world.

It looks a bit murky to me, but they tell me it's an amazing spectacle.

Well, I just had to see for myself!

A secret undersea garden.

But instead of flowers, you get these fantastic creatures...

..peacock worms, clinging on to the pontoon.

And these are sea squirts -

believe it or not, a creature with which human beings share a distant ancestor.

They all thrive here

because the marina creates a unique environment, unlike any other along our coasts.

And here's the reason why.

When the tide comes in, it brings plankton-rich water through these sluice gates.

As the water level falls, the sill of the marina

stops some of it escaping, and the yachts stay afloat.

So the secret here is that the tide doesn't really go out.

Unlike their counterparts outside, life in the marina is never left high and dry.

The creatures that live in this giant rock pool get the best of both worlds -

fresh food twice a day and a sheltered and secure environment,

ideal for some of the more delicate inhabitants, like seahorses.

Mind you, careless yachtsmen drop all sorts of things in the water.

I don't think this'll pick up Radio 2 again!

I can't talk now.

I'm under the sea!

But nothing seems to bother this hefty lobster here.

At this size, he's probably around 50 years old.

He's got a bit of fight in him, though!

They were right.

It is an incredible, secret undersea world.

Such a treat!

Yet again, we created this place for ourselves, but nature benefits.

And back on dry land, another leisure activity

has created a unique refuge for one very special wild creature.

Golf is, apparently, very popular.

There are more than 2,500 golf courses in Britain,

played on by 2.5 million golfers.

And at some time or other, they always end up here - in the rough.

Wish me luck.

Ooh, not bad.

Golfers may curse these little patches of long grass, but wildlife just loves them...

even if some creatures are harder to find than a lost ball.

I'm looking for one of our largest and most fearsome insects, and it's got a giant of a name -

the great green bush cricket.

(Come on. There you are.)

(Don't jump, come on.)

He's one of our largest insects, up to 5cm long.

That's about as long as my thumb, you can see. Beautiful!

Absolutely glorious.

Legs more powerful than those of Linford Christie...

and a much better jumper than Jonathan Edwards.

Sorry, Jonathan.

These are lone hunters,

on the trail of smaller crickets and grasshoppers

in the long, tussocky grass.

And when they do catch their prey,

those powerful jaws make short work of it.

I'm sorry if you're eating your tea.

Because we're so tidy now and keep cutting grass down and smartening things up,

its habitats are getting fewer in number, and it really does like a life in the rough.

So here it is - in the rough.

Go on, then, you get back to your tea and I'll get back to mine.

# Spem in alium... #

For many plants and animals, the key to survival is stability -

living in a place that doesn't change very much over time.

And there's one secret corner of every parish in Britain that provides just that.

From season to season, year to year and century to century,

churchyards stay more or less the same -

an undisturbed place where all God's creatures can find a home.

Birds forage among the gravestones,

or feed on berries from an ancient yew tree.

Mammals are found here, too.

And places like this hold one other ancient secret -

one you can find in every single British churchyard.

For in the midst of death, there is a very special form of life.

There are things living in this churchyard that you could easily overlook.

And yet they're all around me,

on the gravestones,

on the trees,

even on the walls of the church itself.

They're not plants and they're not animals,

and yet they have an amazing lifestyle

and, thanks to their age, an extraordinary story to tell.

And the name of these organisms?

Lichens.

This churchyard on the Cornish coast

is home to more than 120 different kinds of lichens.

They blend in so well, they almost seem to be part of the stone itself.

So what exactly are lichens?

Do you remember in your school biology lessons being told about symbiosis -

the working together of two organisms for mutual benefit? Well, that's lichens.

They're a combination of a fungus and an alga, and as movie mogul

Sam Goldwyn is reputed to have said,

"Between us, baby, we can make something bigger than both of us."

And they certainly do have some remarkable qualities.

For a start, lichens are some of the oldest organisms here.

Some of these individuals will have been growing since before the English Civil War.

They're also among the toughest.

Think of them as the SAS of the natural world.

They can cope with almost anything.

In winter, the temperature on this stone can drop well below zero,

at which point the lichen shuts down its system completely.

Under the baking summer sun, the surface temperature rises

to over 50 degrees - as hot and dry as a desert.

But as soon as the rain begins to fall,

life for the lichen begins again.

Now, lichens may be tough, but they do have an Achilles heel.

"After a long and painful illness, the Lord permitted the cold hand of death

"to do his office in the body and introduced his soul into a world of spirits."

1806.

And coincidentally, that's round about the time

when things started to get a bit tricky for Britain's lichens.

Smoke and soot from the Industrial Revolution filled the air,

and all over the country, lichens began to wither and die.

But there was one place where they could still benefit from a clean environment -

rural churchyards like this one.

And now that our air is once more fit to breathe, lichens are spreading out

from refuges like this and colonising our countryside, towns and cities once again.

So next time you pass through a churchyard, just pause for a while and look at the lichens.

I know they may not be the most glamorous part of our natural heritage,

but when it comes to stamina and endurance, ha!

You've got to admire them.

MUSIC: "Pie Jesu" by Andrew Lloyd Webber

WHISTLE OF DESCENDING ARTILLERY SHELL

This is Salisbury Plain,

the largest military training area in Britain.

50,000 soldiers, hundreds of tanks and dozens of helicopters.

You might think this would be a disaster for wildlife.

But you'd be wrong.

Salisbury Plain is home to some of our rarest and most specialised plants and animals.

And the secret is, they aren't here despite the military presence,

but because of it.

On cold mornings, common lizards perch on discarded shells,

as the heat from the metal allows them to warm up more quickly.

And from a rather unusual vantage point,

barn owls fly off in search of their prey.

But the most remarkable story of how wildlife has found a way

of surviving in this battle-scarred landscape involves this plant,

the devil's bit scabious, and the butterfly that depends on it, the marsh fritillary.

Marsh fritillaries are a rare sight in today's countryside.

Like so many specialised creatures, they struggle to survive in the world of intensive farming.

These butterflies spend their whole life in a little patch of grassland

no bigger than a couple of football pitches.

And they don't ask for much.

All they need is the right soil, that very special plant,

and one other rather unlikely ingredient - a spot of disturbance.

Which is where these tank tracks come in.

They're beginning to grow over a bit now, but where that topsoil was scraped off,

and with it the seeds of those competing plants,

the devil's bit scabious has managed to grow, and look under this leaf -

the maroon-coloured eggs of the marsh fritillary.

By the time these hatch, this plant's going to be about three feet tall.

And that's what makes it so attractive to the marsh fritillary.

Because the scabious grows so well on this churned-up ground,

when those eggs hatch into caterpillars,

it provides just what they need.

The caterpillars set to work, devouring the very plant they live on.

In just two months, they eat many times their own weight in leaves.

Then they go into hibernation and emerge as butterflies the following spring.

Putting all its eggs in one basket is a risky business,

but here at least it works

and, hopefully, next June will see another generation of marsh fritillaries

flitting in the sunlight across Salisbury Plain.

And all because of a little bit of disturbance.

Perhaps they should rename it...

the artillery fritillary.

Sand martins spend half their lives under African skies.

But like the marsh fritillary, when the time comes to raise a family,

these little birds are very choosy about where they breed.

At a sand and gravel quarry in Shropshire!

To get here, they've flown more than 3,000 miles,

crossing the Sahara Desert, the Mediterranean Sea

and the whole of Western Europe.

They may only weigh half an ounce, but sand martins

really are one of the great global voyagers of the bird world.

So why on earth don't they choose a quieter, more tranquil spot to nest?

Well, often they do.

Their natural home is a sandbank alongside a river.

But as they know, these can be at risk of flooding,

so this place provides the ideal alternative.

And by nesting so far up this mountain of sand, high as well as dry,

the sand martins and their growing chicks are well out of harm's way.

But another, much rarer breeding bird takes a far greater risk.

Right down among the mighty machinery in this Yorkshire quarry is a bird that chooses

to nest on the ground - the little ringed plover.

Despite the constant thunder from the heavy machines,

a mother's instinct makes her sit tight.

She'll ignore any threat to her own safety to protect her precious eggs.

Little ringed plovers colonised Britain after the Second World War,

taking advantage of the road-building boom that created so many new gravel quarries.

And while it may not look like the safest place to nest,

this actually has real advantages.

For a start, the incubating bird

can see all around it,

so it'll notice if a ground predator like a fox approaches.

And the pattern on the eggs blends in with the bare shingle,

so aerial hunters like kestrels can't spot them, either.

A few weeks later, if the plovers

have managed to dodge the danger and the tyres,

the first eggs will finally hatch.

PEEP!

PEEP!

PEEP!

This little fella taking his first faltering steps

is so small he'd fit into a matchbox.

Yet incredibly, while mum continues

to incubate her remaining eggs, he must fend for himself

and find tiny morsels of food.

And if he does survive, in just three months' time, he and his siblings

will fly thousands of miles south to spend the winter in Africa.

So what happens to all these holes in the ground when we've finished digging stuff out of them?

Here in Cornwall, a disused china clay quarry has been transformed

into a whole new miniature world - the Eden Project.

Eden attracts more than a million visitors every year.

So now that we've moved back in, is there any room left for nature?

This really is an amazing place - an entire self-contained biosphere,

carefully designed to imitate a natural habitat.

But does this have anything to do with wildlife?

And isn't playing tapes of birdsong to imitate nature going just a bit too far?

Except they're not playing tapes at all. That's a real, wild robin, singing his heart out.

And the robins aren't the only ones.

All sorts of other birds have found a way inside the dome.

Once they're here, there's no need to worry about rain or snow,

and no predators to threaten their eggs or chicks.

What's interesting here is the change in the robins' behaviour. They're famously territorial

and males will often fight with one another, sometimes to the death.

But here, they're placid, sociable,

even friendly with the neighbours.

The way these birds have adapted to a totally new and artificial environment

sums up the resourcefulness of Britain's wild creatures.

For centuries, they've had to cope with the changes that we've made to the landscape,

changes that haven't always been for the best.

TRILLING SONG

Some species, like these robins, have done rather well.

Others, unfortunately, haven't.

And it's to those that we really need to give a helping hand.

In one corner of the English countryside,

that's exactly what we're doing,

in the final chapter of the story of secret Britain.

SKYLARKS SING

This may look like an ordinary field,

but it actually has some pretty extraordinary qualities,

qualities that make it really good for wildlife,

like these plants - different varieties

of a tough little group called sedums.

They grow mainly in deserts and on mountains,

where water's in short supply.

If you look closely at the leaves,

you'll see they're succulent and fleshy, brilliantly adapted to storing water,

and the flowers are brim-full of nectar

to attract insects, and insects attract birds.

And I can hear one of my favourites now - the skylark.

What a show-off, just like an operatic diva!

And that's what makes this field so special.

Skylark numbers have been declining over the last few decades, but here, they're out in force.

Skylarks sing their song in the sky.

But they make their nest at a much more humble level,

down on the ground.

Elsewhere in Britain, they nest on farmland,

in arable fields with long grass to hide the eggs and chicks.

But nesting on the ground creates one major problem.

It means that the chicks are very vulnerable to predators such as hedgehogs, stoats and weasels...

..so vulnerable that any individual nest only has a one-in-three chance of success.

Fortunately for these particular skylarks, that's not a problem.

There are no hedgehogs or weasels in this field, so they can nest in peace.

And the reason there aren't any mammal predators here?

Because this field is more than 30 feet up in the air,

on the roof of the Rolls-Royce factory near Goodwood in Sussex.

It didn't get here by accident.

It was carefully designed to benefit both the company and the birds.

The company does its bit for the environment,

while the skylarks get a safe, secure place to nest.

For the first time in thousands of years, since we originally settled

on these crowded little islands,

we're creating places not just for us

but also with wildlife in mind.

So at long last, in these secret corners of Britain,

the plants and the animals, the birds and the insects

can live happily alongside us.